Category: RKBA

CNN Once Again Shows How Leftists Miss the Point on Gun Control

A CNN opinion columnist recently revealed she knows as much about the gun issue as Alec Baldwin does about gun safety (too soon?). Author Jennifer Tucker recently published a piece titled “Now that guns can kill hundreds in minutes, Supreme Court should rethink the rights question,” in which she argued that the types of firearms one could carry should be limited even further.

In the piece, Tucker referred to the “Theoretical Lethality Index” (TLI), which was developed by a U.S. Army colonel named Trevor Dupuy, who conducted a study in 1964 to examine the effectiveness of various weapons. The study produced a table in which various weapons are ranked by how many strikes can they can achieve in an hour. For instance, a mid-19th century rifle could strike 102 times while a World War II-era machine gun could strike 3,463 times, making it the more lethal weapon.

Tucker seems to indicate that certain guns like the AR15 have the potential to be exceedingly lethal firearms. She writes:

In the 20th century, bullets became smaller and lighter, enabling soldiers to carry more, while design changes increased the damage they caused upon entering the human body. Today, the highly popular civilian AR-15 is a vastly different and substantially more lethal machine than the flintlock muskets that were in use when the Founders crafted the Second Amendment.

The author continues, recalling the tragic Las Vegas shooting which occurred in 2017 when a gunman murdered 58 people and injured 850 others within a span of 10 minutes. “This would have been physically impossible for a single shooter to do in 1791,” she writes.

Then, she makes an argument typical of anti-gunners: The Founding Fathers did not anticipate the evolution of weapons. She argues:

If the Constitution had been written in the 1880s instead of the 1780s, the Framers would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. The Founders lived in an era when they could be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because — as the TLI shows — the killing power of the basic flintlock hadn’t changed in the previous 150 or so years. Dramatic changes occurred, however, during and after the Civil War.

The author insists that “given the rapid technological change we’ve seen in firearms over the last century and a half, the notion that guns should be viewed equally across all times and places is logically flawed.”

She goes on to contend that “just as courts don’t regard the bleeding and purging of patients as the gold standards of health care … “common sense dictates that the law must take into account technological change in firearms.”

Her overall point can be summed up in this statement:

There is room for looking at the lethality of modern firearms when considering the constitutionality of gun regulation. The court implicitly acknowledged this in its Heller decision when it stated that machine gun bans were acceptable. It’s a difficult concession to explain unless the court is considering the modern capabilities of firearms outside of the historical scope of regulation.

The Supreme Court is set to adjudicate what could be a landmark case when it comes to gun rights. The judges will review New York Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen, which is a case targeting New York’s gun licensing scheme. The plaintiffs allege that the state’s approach to deciding who is allowed to possess a license to carry a firearm violates the Second Amendment.

In her piece, Tucker argues:

Weapons designed with an ever-increasing capacity to kill large numbers of people in battle, with long barrels and large-capacity magazines, have no place in public spaces, supermarkets, and shopping malls — not on the grounds of a generic right to self-defense. When it takes up this new gun case, the Court should take technological innovation into account and acknowledge that guns are now exponentially more lethal than they were when the Constitution was written.

We’ve heard these arguments before, haven’t we?

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Do tell……………

New study finds little effect from Massachusetts gun control measures on violent crimes

A new study from American University found that the tightened gun-control measures that went into effect in Massachusetts six years ago had little effect on the violent crime rate in the state, raising questions about enforcement of these laws.
“Gun violence remains at the forefront of the public policy debate when it comes to enacting new or strengthening existing gun legislation in the United States,” said Janice Iwama, assistant professor of justice, law, and criminology at AU, who conducted the study. “Yet the political polarization and relatively limited scholarly research on guns and gun violence make it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to enact and implement legislation that addresses the public health and safety issues associated with gun violence.”
The study, published in Justice Quarterly, used modeling and FBI data from 2006 to 2016 to examine the impact of the 2015 gun law on crimes including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
The law, enacted in the wake of the Sandy Hook, Conn., school shooting by former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, paved the way for the creation of a web portal for gun dealers to check the validity of a firearm license and track sales and transfers of firearms. It also tightened requirements for background checks on the sale of firearms and licensing procedures.
Iwama, who authored the study, noted that the entire country, including the Bay State, experienced a drop in crime since the 1990s. Still, Massachusetts had 287,000 violent crimes from 2006 to 2016, including “198,402 aggravated assaults, 70,361 robberies, 19,107 rapes, and 1,698 instances of murder or non-negligent man-slaughter.”
About 1% to 5% of adult residents in each Massachusetts county have a firearms license.
She found that a one percentage point rise in denied licenses and denied licenses due to unsuitability increased robberies by 7.3% and 8.9%, respectively, after the new law took effect. For every other type of violent crime, including rape, murder and aggravated assault, she found no statistically significant change.
Iwama suggested the issue could be caused by uneven enforcement of the laws across counties, an overall lag in enforcement and/or because residents are obtaining firearms in neighboring states with looser gun laws. She recommended that policymakers revisit the legislation to ensure it’s being property applied and enforced.

The Brit MP got stabbied by a moslem jihadi import, but **Giffords** tries to use this BS article to push for more gun control over here.

**Not Giffords herself, her handlers.  Anyone with one more functioning synapse one can listen to her speak for more than 5 words and can tell she’s nothing more than a cabbage head ChattyCathy pull the string doll, which makes the odds she can write such an article as this highly unlikely.

Opinion: Gabby Giffords: The stabbing of a British MP is another example of how violence eats away at democracy

As the stabbing of Amess makes all too clear, the problem of politicized violence is endemic around the world. But in the United States, this problem is exacerbated by our tragically lax gun laws……………

I’ve got a phone number for them to call – 800 CRY BABY

To Gun Grabbers’ Horror, 2020 and 2021 Have Been the Perfect Storm of Arguments in Favor of Gun Rights.

I’ve spent much of the past six months interviewing people across the United States in the leadup to the [New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen] case—part of research for a book I’m writing about the cultural and racial effects of U.S. gun laws. Although I uncovered a wide range of opinions, these interviews have given me a greater appreciation for the ways that high-level political games become grounded in the ostensibly “organic” political instincts of everyday Americans.

Among conservative white gun owners in the South and Midwest, I found there is often reflexive support for the idea that northern and urban gun-control laws should be overturned. This was true even for many interview subjects who had never been to the cities in question—and particularly so when I explained that the case centers around gun laws in New York. “New York—well that says it all right there,” a Tennessee Uber driver in his fifties told me. “Hell yes I would want to carry my guns in New York [should I ever go there],” said a Michigan real estate agent in her forties. For these and other conservative interviewees, gun laws in cities like New York represented symbolic northern affront to their notion of uninfringed liberties (“It’s my constitutional right to carry anywhere I want”)—and in places where they imagine they would need to defend themselves against threats from racial others (“I might get carjacked!”).

But I also found a surprising current of pro-gun sentiment among a not insignificant minority of people who identified as liberal and who lived in the very cities in question—especially among people under forty. “Criminals have guns, so why shouldn’t we?” a thirty-seven-year-old white woman art dealer in Brooklyn told me. “Why should police have all the guns?” asked a twenty-six-year-old Black male programmer from Manhattan. A thirty-three-year-old white woman realtor from Boston explained that “hopefully this will make it easier for my friends and me to take shooting classes.”

These types of replies reflect an almost perfect storm of factors that have hardened, enhanced, or shifted attitudes toward guns in 2020 and 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in near-apocalyptic levels of anxiety and mistrust. In the early months of the pandemic, guns and bullets flew of the shelves as quickly as Purell and toilet paper—spurred by then President Donald Trump’s alarmist rhetoric that urged supporters to “save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

Gun sales then rose by over 300 percent in the aftermath of the May 2020 killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed—both among protesters concerned about police violence and among white people with deep fears of racial protest. Not missing a beat, the NRA ramped up efforts to sell more guns to communities of color. When they stood on their St. Louis lawn waving guns at passing protesters, Mark and Patricia McCloskey became the clown-car villains of the left—but heroes of the castle-doctrine right. All the while, gun manufacturers retained unprecedented immunity from lawsuits, and (thanks to the Trump administration) expressly pro-gun justices [presided] over ever-more courthouses across the country—including the Supreme Court.

Evidence suggests that even people from groups that have historically been the strongest supporters of gun control began packing heat as a result of these cultural shifts. Ranks of liberal and Democrat gun owners grew exponentially in 2020 and 2021. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah describes the “allure” of guns and gun groups for Black women “feeling a need to protect ourselves in an anti-Black and misogynistic society.” Armed Black self-defense—the very thought of which was once a rationale for white anxiety, Black oppression, and stricter gun control—has witnessed a revival as a viable movement of people who are “Black and up in arms.”

The confluence of these factors has led even many supporters of gun regulation to question its utility or, worse, to despair that gun control is a “lost cause.” “What are we even doing? America feels like it’s moved on from this issue,” a GVP organizer and activist in Nashville told me, even as shootings and deaths spiked in the city.

— Jonathan M. Metzl in The Supreme Court Is Poised to Put Politics Ahead of Gun-Violence Prevention

Welcome to the Party, Pal!

Polimath (and others) are feeling the same oppressive weight of the government boot on their necks that America’s gun owners have been feeling ever since the introduction of the Sullivan Act.

“Just give up a little bit of your rights, and you’ll make the rest of us feel safer” has been the motto of the gun control movement since day one. Now that same logic, (if you want to equate emotion of feeling safe as logic) is being applied to public health as a whole, and people aren’t liking what they’re hearing.

Stephen Kruiser once said that firearms are the gateway drug to freedom. In this case, however, firearms ownership is the canary in the coal mine. What big government and runaway political corruption have been doing to our freedoms under the Second Amendment, they’re now doing to every other civil right as well.

Welcome to the party, everyone. Don’t say we never tried to warn you.

Ohio Republicans pass bill to ban gun store closures during emergencies

Republicans in the Ohio Senate passed a bill 23 to 7 Wednesday that says local governments can’t close gun stores or confiscate firearms during riots or other states of emergency.

“During the COVID pandemic, it became evident that local, state and federal governments have sweeping powers when it came to emergencies,” Sen. Tim Schaffer, R -Lancaster, said.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine carved out an exemption for gun stores in his stay-at-home orders, but other states did not.

“Therefore this bill is critical to proactively define the limits of government’s power to further abuses,” Schaffer said.

Senate Bill 185 would also ban local governments from invalidating concealed carry licenses or closing down shooting ranges.

Current law allows local governments to prohibit the sale or transportation of “firearms or other dangerous weapons” such as crossbows and knives when suppressing a riot or “when there is a clear and present danger of a riot.”

SB 185 would eliminate that provision for everything except dynamite and other explosives.

And that’s a problem for Democrats like Sen. Cecil Thomas, a Democrat from Cincinnati’s Avondale neighborhood.

“You’re denying local governments the ability to protect their communities as they deem appropriate,” Thomas said.

Groups like the Ohio Municipal League opposed the bill in committing, saying it would violate the home rule authority of local governments.

“The Ohio Constitution grants Home Rule authority to municipalities in recognition that a government closest to the people governs best,” Ohio Municipal League Director Ken Scarrett said earlier this month. “Each city and village should be equipped to serve and protect the interests of their communities.”

SB 185 now heads to the Republican-controlled Ohio House for consideration.

Gun-Shy Writer Has Second Thoughts About Defenselessness

Since the start of the pandemic and the corresponding Great Gun Run of 2020/2021, we’ve seen millions of Americans embrace their Second Amendment rights for the very first time, and not all of them are conservatives worried about their individual freedoms being taken away. There’s been a rise in the number of self-described liberals with a growing interest in gun ownership over the past 20 months or so as well, including Samuel Ligon, a novelist and teacher at Eastern Washington University.

Ligon recently wrote about what drove him to take class on basic firearms handling as he debated buying a gun, and as it turns out, it was conservative 2A activists that had the biggest impact on him.

This was a few months after the BLM demonstrations in Spokane, Washington, when the militia was out at night with their guns and camouflage costumes. Kate and I saw them on TV and Twitter, in Spokane and all over the West, men with assault weapons ready for war.

I’d seen them in Olympia, too, armed citizens asserting their rights. The third-grade teachers would usher their students back to the buses, their Capitol tour abruptly over. This was before the Capitol grounds were fenced, before people started shooting each other during weekend protests. In August, Kate and I saw a guy at the Country Store shopping with his wife and toddler with a gun on his hip, a posture I found idiotic, intimidating, infuriating. He was why I wanted to go to gun school. I hated him for walking around like that.

I didn’t tell Kate I was going for weeks, and when I did tell her, she didn’t say much. In fact, she didn’t say anything. I considered canceling, but it had been so hard to get a spot. Everyone wanted to go to gun school. The pandemic — or something worse, whatever it was that had been tearing us apart for years — was working our fear, making some of us conclude that we might have to shoot somebody soon, which is what we mean when we talk about self-defense.

For Ligon, it was the armed response to the “demonstrations” that made him want a firearm for protection, but for many others, it was the riots, looting, and violence in cities from coast-to-coast that made them think about their Second Amendment rights for the first time in their lives. And even after the riots and demonstrations subsided, the violence has remained. Ligon doesn’t say anything about the crime rate in Spokane influencing his desire to own a gun, but homicides in the city doubled in 2020 compared to 2019, and I don’t think the “militia” was responsible for any of them.

But it wasn’t just Ligon who was interested in picking up a firearm. His brother told him he’d bought a gun. His brother-in-law admitted he’d bought a shotgun, though he hadn’t yet purchased any shells.

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BLUF:
The public is not rendered “safer” when citizens are disarmed, but rendered only more vulnerable to (and powerless against) those who would do them harm.

11 More Reasons Biden Administration Is Wrong About Onerous Gun Restrictions

The Biden administration last month filed a brief encouraging the Supreme Court to uphold New York City’s de facto ban preventing ordinary citizens from carrying firearms in public.

The administration argued that an onerous “good cause” requirement—giving the city’s police department unmitigated discretion over citizens’ exercise of a fundamental right—is a perfectly reasonable regulation.

This court brief is just one of several high-profile actions taken this year by the Biden administration that underscore its lack of commitment to taking the Second Amendment seriously.

New York City’s law, one of a myriad of serious burdens placed on New Yorkers’ right to keep and bear arms, prevents the vast majority of residents from being able to meaningfully protect themselves in public when the government fails to do so. And the government often fails to do so.

In fact, almost every major study on the issue has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes an article monthly underscoring some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place.

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in August. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)

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When dishonesty is their stock in trade, it’s only logical to conclude these people want to disarm you because they want to do something they know they would likely be shot for.

Everytown Lies Their Tongues Off With Claim on Child and Teen Deaths

Everytown is one of the largest deep-pocketed anti-Bill of Rights organizations out there. They do serious lobbying and litigation. Their “reporting” arm is The Trace, a publication whose bias should be obvious from who is buttering their bread.

Everytown has a documented history of lying to advance their cause. Those of us on the pro-Rights side are jaded by their behavior, but if you thought that their boldness and daring in peddling falsehoods had peaked, you would be wrong.

Back in August, Everytown posted the following tweet:

 

“Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America ages 0-19. Our kids shouldn’t have to die like this.”

Really? Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America? That sounded off, so I went straight to the motherlode of statistics: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC has a page where you can get detailed information on Leading Causes of Death and Injury.

Trying to get a quick answer, I checked out their “Ten Leading Causes of Death and Injury” infographic images. For both 2018 and 2017, the top cause of death is “unintentional injury,” not firearms, as Everytown claimed above. So, I dug in further to see if Everytown’s claim was buried somewhere, and it was all just a misunderstanding. For both 2018 and 2017, the top categories of “unintentional injury” were dominated by traffic accidents, drowning, and suffocation. So, again, I decided to give Everytown the benefit of the doubt and dug into an even smaller subset of “violence-related injury deaths.” And yet again, for both 2018 and 2017, I found that the top causes were dominated by traffic accidents, drowning, and suffocation. Firearms were clearly not the “leading cause of death” as Everytown claimed.

But what if the infographic images were not providing the accurate picture because the range of years covered (2017-18) was too narrow?

So, to be sure, I ran a custom report on the “Ten Leading Causes of Death.” This report includes all the data available from 2001–2019. Once again, I didn’t see firearms as the leading cause in the report data. Drilling down, the same pattern of traffic accidents, drowning, and suffocation persisted. For the 15-24 age range, poisoning made a cameo; diving into that revealed that drug overdoses are listed as poisoning and were the leading cause of death in the poisoning category.

What if the above report was inaccurate because the age groups were too broad? After all, the CDC’s 15+ range went from 15-year-olds all the way to 24-year-olds.

So, I ran another custom report, this one covering data from 1999–2019. (Note that this custom report was not available for 2001–2019.) Under the “Advanced Options,” I was able to set a custom age range from “<1” to 19, which was the age range that Everytown claimed in their tweet. Yet again over this 20-year period, unintentional injury deaths (184,060) – the top cause – were almost 3.5 times higher than homicides (53,628), and almost twice as high than homicides and suicides (44,595) combined. Homicides and suicides included all means, not just those committed using firearms. Again, this report didn’t substantiate Everytown’s claim. Out of curiosity, I limited the age range from “<1” to 17, because 18- and 19-year-olds are voting-age adults; homicides and suicides dropped even lower with these criteria.

I still wasn’t giving up on Everytown; what if I messed up somehow and Everytown was actually correct. So, I ran a final report with the data the CDC has going back to the 1981–1998 period. And yet again, unintentional injury deaths (257,110) vastly outnumbered homicides (60,768) and suicides (38,215); note that the homicide and suicide numbers include all means, firearms, cutting instruments, blunt objects… you name it.

Based on the CDC’s reports and readily available infographics, I was not able to substantiate Everytown’s claim. If Everytown has any data that’s not conjured out of thin air, they need to come clean and disclose it. Until then, their deliberate misinformation needs to be stopped by those of us on the pro-Rights side, using free speech and facts, not by calling for censoring or silencing them.

The Right to Bear Arms: Learning Liberty – Cubs to Bears

Recommended Age Range: 4-12

The Right to Bear Arms is a tool designed to assist parents in teaching children about the Second Amendment and constitutional liberties.  It highlights the time Charisma Cat attempted to take over the forest by using tricks, social shame, and manipulation to convince other animals to give up their teeth and claws.  Only the Bears refuse to surrender their arms.  You can guess what happens next.

The book includes a FREE downloadable lesson plan which discusses the historical events that precede the ratification of the second Amendment and prompts children to think critically about their Right to self-defense.

The back of the book includes seven coloring pages featuring the characters in the book.

Well, that ‘we’ isn’t as inclusive as might be thought.

We Still Haven’t Learned The Lessons Of Luby’s 30 Years Later

Luby’s Cafeteria is one of the earlier mass shootings of our modern era. Predating Columbine, it was a nightmare scenario that the city of Killean, TX is still reeling from 30 years later. That’s certainly understandable.

After all, it was something so unexpected that it would be difficult not to reel.

The tragic Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen left survivors, residents, and city leaders hoping and praying such a senseless, murderous incident would never happen again in the United States.

“No community is, or could ever be, prepared for the tragedy which struck Killeen on October 16, 1991,” said a 1991 Herald thank-you-to-first-responders display ad from then-Mayor Major Blair and Killeen City Council. “Our hope and prayers are that a similar event will never again occur in any community.”

At the time, the Luby’s tragedy was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, however, that’s no longer the case.

In the three decades since George “JoJo” Hennard, 35, of Belton, drove his blue Ford Ranger pickup through a plate glass window of Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen and murdered 23 Luby’s Cafeteria lunchtime diners on National Bosses Day, America has mourned 111 mass shootings, eight of those in Texas, in which 846 people were killed, according to a mass shooting database by nonprofit Mother Jones.

Two of those mass shootings occurred at Fort Hood, in 2009 and 2014, in which 16 people were killed in all.

In the decade prior to the Luby’s massacre, according to the mass shooting database, America had nine mass shootings, classified as an attack where three or more victims are killed in a public place.

It’s awful.

One thing everyone can probably agree on is that we haven’t learned our lessons since then. The problem is that we don’t agree on what those lessons actually are.

For the anti-Second Amendment jihadists, though, the lessons are “guns r teh badz.” Never you mind that five people were just murdered with a bow and arrow last week, the problem truly is guns.

Yet there was an actual lesson here:

Former state representative and Luby’s survivor Suzanna Hupp, lost both of her parents in the Luby’s shooting. Hupp, who lobbies for looser gun control laws, said she would’ve been able to stop the shooter if Texas had allowed concealed carry in 1991. She had a handgun at the time, but left it in her vehicle because of the law at the time.

DING DING DING! We have a winner!

Luby’s was a target in part because people couldn’t carry a firearm there. There was little to no chance of meeting armed resistance. Hupp would have been in a position to end the attack before it really got going, but she complied with the law. We saw the same thing happen in Virginia Beach, too.

What’s that phrase? “If it saves just one life,” or something like that? Yeah, I think that’s it.

Look, I’m not saying ending gun-free zones will put an end to mass shootings. I think it’ll stop a lot of them, but someone will still try to shoot up places for whatever demented reason.

What I will say is that we can specifically point to two cases–and who knows how many others we’re unaware of–where someone was barred from carrying a gun, so they were unarmed when a mass shooting happened. If it wouldn’t have made a difference in any of the others, it would have at least saved lives in Luby’s Cafeteria and in Virginia Beach.

But I don’t believe they were the only two cases, either. They’re just the two I know of definitively.

That’s the lesson we can’t seem to learn. We can’t seem to grasp that bad things are going to happen. You’re never going to stop that. But you can minimize the damage by trusting law-abiding citizens with the very rights protected in the Constitution, including the right to keep and bear arms.

Impossible!

BLUF:
And again, we were reminded that the bad guys don’t pay attention to signs banning firearms or illegal weapons.  If they were the kind to abide by rules, they wouldn’t be bad guys.

A Pennsylvania mall that bans guns has mass shooting

Although the daily news always provides plenty of examples of people doing genuinely bad things (assault, robbery, rape, murder, etc.), the fact is that most people in America are law-abiding.  And while some will sit passively while a violent rape occurs directly in front of them, many of these good citizens will act when called upon to do so.  Nevertheless, America’s retail stores and entertainment venues insist on disarming the good guys under the delusional belief that it will stop the bad guys.

The latest example of this urge to disarm comes from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a shooting occurred at the Park City Center shopping mall on Sunday afternoon:

Gunshots rang out at the Park City Center in Lancaster around 2:30 p.m., according to Lancaster Online.

Two people suffered gunshot wounds and two suspects were in custody, according to police and the website, which said the injuries were not life-threatening.

An argument broke out between four people outside an international food store, the owner of the store told the outlet. One man brandished a gun during a scuffle, and it was knocked away by a man who then opened fire, according to the report.

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Six States Boast More than 1 Million Carry Licenses Each

Six Second Amendment friendly states now boast more than one million active concealed carry licenses/permits each, including Florida with more than 2.5 million licenses in circulation, one of several revelations in the updated annual report on Concealed Carry in the United States from the Crime Prevention Research Center.

The other states are Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Texas.

It is the kind of news that sets off alarms in the gun prohibition lobby. Anti-gunners and their allies on Capitol Hill are determined to reduce the number of armed citizens. But the new CPRC report says the exact opposite has happened over the past few years, especially over the last 12 months. Since October 2020, the nation has seen two million additional permits/licenses approved, bringing the number of legally-packing adult Americans to 21.52 million, and that’s not all. Read the report’s abstract here.

Twenty-one states now have so-called “constitutional carry” where no permit is required to carry a firearm. According to the CPRC report, “While permits are soaring in the non-Constitutional Carry states, they fell in the Constitutional Carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states.”

Texas is the newest permitless carry state, yet more than a million Lone Star gun owners still have permits, allowing them to be recognized under reciprocity laws in other states.

In all, the report from CPRC’s founder and President John Lott—the researcher and author—and researcher Rujun Wang lists 15 states in which more than 10 percent of the adult population is licensed to carry. In addition to the states mentioned earlier, the roundup includes are Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Tennessee, incidentally, is where Smith & Wesson is moving a large part of its current Massachusetts operation, taking hundreds of jobs out of the Bay State and the accompanying revenue to friendlier surroundings.

The 69-page CPRC report offers several other revelations, among them being that “8.3% of American adults have permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 10.0% of adults have a permit.”

The Supreme Court on Nov. 3 will hear oral arguments in a case challenging New York’s “proper cause” requirement to get a carry permit, which officials routinely use to deny permit applications. Only the privileged seem able to show “proper cause” while average citizens cannot. The case is known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Another CPRC revelation: “In 2021, women made up 28.3% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender, an increase from the 26.4% last year. Seven states had data from 2012 to 2020/2021, and permit numbers grew 108.7% faster for women than for men.”

Increasing numbers of women are arming up, a pattern that has been building in recent years. With reductions in police manpower as a result of the “defund the police” movement that started in 2020 following the death of George Floyd while being restrained by Minneapolis police.

The CPRC report also notes that in three states where race and gender data is collected, there were “remarkably larger increases in permits for minorities compared to whites.” The report also reveals that four states keeping track of race between 2015-2021, “the number of Asian people with permits increased 93.2% faster than the number of whites with permits. Blacks appear to be the group that has experienced the largest increase in permitted concealed carry, growing 135.7% faster than whites.”

 

Study: More Than 21-Million Concealed Carry Holders, Up 10.5% In 2020

During the Coronavirus pandemic, the number of concealed handgun permits has soared to over 21.52 million – a 48% increase since 2016. It’s also a 10.5% increase over the number of permits we counted a year ago in 2020. Unlike gun ownership surveys that may be affected by people’s unwillingness to answer personal questions, concealed handgun permit data is the only really “hard data” that we have. This increase occurred despite 21 Constitutional Carry states that no longer provide data on all those legally carrying a concealed handgun because people in those states no longer need a permit to carry.

These numbers are particularly topical given that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the concealed carry case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association V. Corlett in November. That case will determine whether those requesting permits need to provide a “proper cause,” which means a good reason for obtaining a permit.

A copy of the report is available here 

 

Elite Media Can’t Stop Lying About Guns in America

The mainstream media lies to us. They feed us propaganda. They don’t want us to know that gun ownership is widespread and that armed defense is common. I was at a conference for minor-media this weekend. There, an associate talked about being turned away from most of his local news stations because “we don’t run pro-gun stories. No self-defense.” Let me show you where the propaganda starts at the top.

Dr. John Lott looked at the five largest newspapers in the US. They ran 1 self-defense story for every 1300 stories of criminal activity with a gun. (more here)

The good news, and there is some good news, is that we know better. We have data that comes from outside the media bubble. We caught major US newspapers lying to us. We can actually measure the amount of media distortion.

We use a firearm for defense far more often than the thugs use guns during a crime. We legally defend ourselves about four times more often than a criminal uses a gun to threaten or injure us (467 thousand criminal incidents vs 1.4-2.3 million defensive gun uses).

We can quantify the media exaggeration. Honest reporting would tell us when we were attacked and also tell us when we defended ourselves. That isn’t what we get from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, or the Wall Street Journal. Each time it occurs, these major US newspapers were over 5 thousand times more likely to run a story of victimization than defense. Distortions of that magnitude can’t be an accident. That censorship is the result of deliberate editorial policy.

That is serious. That biased reporting distorts public perception of violence and defense. It twists public policy, and it isn’t an accident. Media propaganda isn’t a fault, but a deliberate feature that was bought and paid for.

Anti-gun billionaires paid millions of dollars to twist the news. They ran “educational” conferences for the media on how to report self-defense as “gun violence”. They also pay propagandists to recommend movie and TV scripts that distort the truth about civilian self-defense.

You can prove it to yourself. We defend ourselves more often than the police, and ordinary citizens make fewer mistakes with a gun than the police. So, when was the last time you saw an honest portrayal of armed defense on the TV cop dramas where an ordinary person used a firearm responsibly? I couldn’t find a single one.

Media apologists have said that self-defense isn’t news. I disagree. The biased media buries armed defense stories even in incidents where armed citizens stopped mass murder. Again, the media was too busy lying about us and our neighbors to report the truth.

I’m reminded of the Chinese immigrant who said he never watched the news when he was in China because he knew the news was filled with lies. Again, let me close by sharing some good news. We’re walking away from the lying media. CNN lost half its viewers in the last year.

Find real news and listen past the lies.

Biden’s Climb to Institute Gun Restrictions Gets Steeper

The President’s gun agenda has been having a hard time through the first year of his term, and it’s only getting worse.

The House has passed two background-check expansion bills, but they aren’t going anywhere in the Senate. His plan to ban “assault weapons,” including the AR-15, hasn’t even gotten a vote in the House. Neither has his stated top priority of repealing legal protections provided to gun makers and dealers for third parties’ criminal misuse of their products.

He couldn’t even convince the Democratic Senate caucus to vote for the ATF director nominee he was counting on to shepherd his executive-branch efforts to implement gun restrictions. And it’s now unlikely he’ll get another opportunity to confirm a director before the end of his first term. That’s especially true after the new polling we saw this week.

As Americans continue to sour on the President’s handling of guns, his political capital will sink alongside his approval numbers. His approval on the issue dropped 10 points in the Economist/YouGov poll since June. It has fallen by half since the Associated Press measured it back in May.

In an atmosphere where Biden already can’t sway moderate Democratic Senators to vote for a nominee they never publicly opposed, it’s difficult to imagine how he’ll be able to convince them to vote for gun-control policies they have come out against in the past–especially while his standing with the public continues to deteriorate. Senators Angus King (I., Maine), Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), Jon Tester (D., Mont.), and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) wouldn’t go along what Biden wanted when he was polling 10 points better on the issue. Why would they budge on any of the gun bills he wants to pass now?

The odds get longer when you consider how low voters rank the issue of guns on their priority list. The Economist/YouGov poll found only 3 percent of Americans listed guns as their most important issue. That puts it in a tie for the 3rd-least-important issue out of thirteen polled.

As you might imagine, voter apathy tends not to generate action in DC.

So, the President is left with executive action to implement some semblance of the restrictions he seeks. He won’t have his chosen manager to push through those actions, which will handicap him to some degree. But, that doesn’t mean he won’t be able to enact sweeping changes that affect millions of American gun owners.

In fact, his administration appears to be pushing ahead with the effort to increase the ATF’s power by significantly broadening the definition of what constitutes a firearm and the effort to ban possession of nearly all of the millions of pistol-brace-equipped AR-15s in circulation. That’s despite the hundreds of thousands of mostly negative public comments on the proposals. The aggressive executive action hasn’t helped keep his approval on the gun issue up among Democrats, and it has likely driven some of the disapproval among Republicans and Independents.

But, unilateral action is the only viable approach left for him at this point. And, it’s not clear where else he’ll be able to find room to pull it off in a meaningful way. Though, it’s safe to expect him to try and do so.

Women Want One Thing…And It’s Not Going to Make Liberals Happy

Women want one thing— It’s guns. They want lots of guns. This isn’t anything new. For the Left, this might be a massive revelation, but the truth is this trend has been ongoing for years. Women lining up for concealed carry permits is booming. Women-only firearm courses are booming. Gun sales among women are booming. And if there’s one thing we should know about politics and elections, it’s that it’s probably not the best idea to be against something that a lot of women support, especially white middle-class women.

In Clark County, a lot of women have joined the Annie Oakley courses and the reasoning behind the surge is quite simple. It’s for their protection. It’s the great equalizer when confronted by a violent attacker. The summer of riots that occurred last year. The anxiety over the lockdowns during the COVID pandemic—it all played a part. A mother and daughter who were interviewed for Fox5 Las Vegas’ segment on the female participation in the shooting said they bought a handgun after a home invasion. Being smart, the mother wanted her daughter to know how to shoot and handle a handgun safely.

Women are reshaping the gun industry. It’s one of the underreported narratives over the past couple of years, partially because major outlets don’t want to acknowledge it. It shreds all the anti-gun talking points like shooting is a white male activity. That gun ownership, in general, has racist ties. It’s all historically illiterate garbage. Good on these ladies for exercising their constitutional rights.

‘FBI REPORT SAYS ARMED CITIZENS KILLED MORE CRIMINALS THAN POLICE’ 

BELLEVUE, WA – The FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2020 indicates that armed private citizens killed more criminals during the commission of a felony than were killed by police, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms says this data clearly underscores the continuing need for American gun ownership.

“We looked at Tables 14 and 15 in the FBI’s new report that apply to justifiable homicides by law enforcement and private citizens, respectively,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Last year, according to the data, armed citizens killed 343 criminals during the commission of a felony while police fatally shot 298 felons.

“If the FBI data published in their crime report for 2020 is accurate,” he continued, “it is ample evidence that the individual right to keep and bear arms for personal defense is as important today as it was when the Second Amendment was adopted as a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights.

“The use of deadly force is not something anybody wants,” Gottlieb observed, “but neither is being injured or killed by some thug during a violent criminal attack. Self-defense may be the oldest natural right, and every time we hear some politician, public official or gun control extremist call for citizen disarmament, we have to wonder which side they’re on. It certainly can’t be on the side of public safety.

“Gun prohibitionists who enjoy their own private security while promoting restrictive laws that take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens are world-class hypocrites,” he said. “The same people who want to disarm honest citizens are typically those who support policies that are soft on criminals. They haven’t simply lost perspective; they’ve abandoned common sense.”

CCRKBA has long defended the individual right to keep and bear arms, and encourages gun owners to seek competent instruction on firearms safety and the use of firearms in self-defense. Gottlieb noted how studies show that over 99 percent of cases when a gun is used in self-defense, no shots are fired. The burglar, robber or rapist flees or is held at gunpoint until police arrive, he said.

“This data should send a message to criminals that their chances of recidivism are gradually shrinking,” said Gottlieb, who co-authored America Fights Back – Armed Self-Defense in a Violent Age, and more recently, Good Guys with Guns. “The tide has clearly turned.”